Social Video Can Build Awareness, Advocacy For Luxury Brands (Luxury Daily)
Regardless of whether you’re running a marketing campaign for luxury brand, all marketers should be aware of the ‘four As’ of social video creation and distribution.

Charity Feeds Videos Across Web for Hunger Action Month (ClickZ)
Feeding America has created a customizable widget with video featuring celebrity supporters like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Local food banks can post the widget on their site and add their own logo at the end of the video for a personal touch.

How many governors are using social media? (Stateline)
A look at all 50 governors and links to their social media sites.

You know something has had an impact on you when you’re still thinking about it weeks after the fact. And what happened recently on YouTube got me thinking.

Members of Congress and their staffs have gotten used to a world where a constituent writes a postal letter or e-mail or calls the office and the office responds in written form to the citizen’s concerns. One of the challenges that social media creates for congressional offices is that they can no longer just wait for constituent communication to come to them. They now need to monitor external sources to capture it all.

As Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers said in our “Inside the Hill” web series, “the world has changed.”

What punctuated this for me was the flurry of activity around a Senate vote regarding the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Regardless of what side of this sensitive social issue you come down on, something happened that should be instructive to Members of Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens alike.

The Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) is an organization dedicated to ending DADT. They recently enlisted Lady Gaga, of…well…Lady Gaga fame, to create and post a YouTube video asking her considerable fan base to call their Senators to request an end to the ban on openly gay service members. This video is interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that, when she calls her Senators live in the video, she never actually gets through to either one because the volume of calls to the Senate’s phone system resulted in a busy signal from one and an at-capacity mailbox from the other. What happens next is even more interesting.

In a dorm room in Boulder, Colorado, two college students named Ellie and Lauren decide to heed the advice of SLDN and Lady Gaga and contact their Senator, the junior Senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. They don’t just pick up the phone though, they record a video of themselves calling the Senator’s office, much like Lady Gaga did in her video. At times laughing and a bit perplexed by the process—something they had clearly never done before—they ultimately left a voicemail message for Senator Bennet on September 14.

The following day, September 15, Senator Bennet was quick to respond to Ellie and Lauren with a short, 17-second video assuring them that he supports the repeal of DADT. While Senator Bennet is not the first Member to record a YouTube response directly to a constituent, the speed with which the Senator responded seems to illustrate a change that is taking place on Capitol Hill. Members are starting to become more adept at using social media tools to engage in a genuine two-way dialogue with constituents.

What does this mean for Congress and the citizen advocates that want to participate in the policy making process?

Implications for Congressional Offices:

1. Social media tools like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook can allow you to reach constituents that you might not otherwise reach. This may have been the only way that Senator Bennet would have had contact with these two Colorado residents.
2. I can hear staffers groaning (I know, I was one) at the thought of trying to pin down their bosses and get them to record messages back to constituents on YouTube. It will no doubt be challenging, but the Bennet video took 17 seconds to record. Most Members’ schedules can accommodate the creation of a couple of videos each week or month.
3. The best way to encourage your boss to engage in social media is to demonstrate the impact it can have. At the writing of this post the Bennet video had been viewed more than 38,000 times!

Implications for Grassroots Advocates:

1. While tempting, this outcome cannot be replicated for every one of your campaigns and for every Member of Congress. The best thing you can do is determine the best avenue of communications for each and every one of the 541 Members of Congress. If Members like Rep. Culberson and Sen. McCaskill are prolific users of Twitter (and they are), then maybe you use Twitter. If there are Members who haven’t yet embraced social media (and there are) a YouTube campaign will be much less effective.
2. Not everyone has Lady Gaga on their side, but is there someone who has the ear of a lot of other someones that you could enlist in your efforts?
3. As the Lady Gaga video illustrates, if the message to your supporters is “call your Senator” and the Senate’s phone system is overloaded (something our friends in the Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms assures us is being upgraded to better accommodate higher volumes of calls) then your advocates will be frustrated with both you and their Members. Be more strategic in how you suggest that your members contact their elected officials.

Debt, spending and taxes don’t exactly translate into blockbusters. Over the course of the past couple weeks, however, web videos on each subject have illustrated just how significant those issues are for engaged citizens.

A project called Bankrupting America set out earlier this year to escalate the issue of government spending by using innovative communications techniques. A major component was online video — not the easiest goal to fulfill given the platform, subject matter and audience.

After about four months of experimenting, Bankrupting America hit one out the park with its latest video and accompanying “Spending Fail Map.” Clay Broga and Michelle McAdoo ask people on the street about various government projects and whether they’re real or fake. It’s astonishing — and at times humorous — the stupid things our government funds.

“We tried to take a serious and concerning topic — how both parties in government are overspending our hard-earned taxpayer dollars in this time of economic need — and turn it into something that was both entertaining and informative,” McAdoo said.

The video recently hit viral status and is nearly at 150,000 views on YouTube. The best part? All it required was a little creativity and interviews on the street.

The office of House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) took the opposite approach. Its highly produced 13-minute documentary, “Obama’s Endgame,” chronicles the challenges of the national debt. Featuring interviews with Republican members of Congress, it’s a serious look at the consequences of inaction.

Conventional wisdom for years kept political and policy videos to about two minutes in length. The success of Cantor’s video shatters that notion. It currently has more than 100,000 views.

“Put simply, the public now accepts long-form online videos as a viable viewing choice; providing the opportunity to tell compelling stories and convey increasingly complex information,” writes Matt Lira, Cantor’s director of new media. “Undoubtedly, long-form video will play an important role in political communications going forward.”

Cantor’s video is significant for another reason: It builds on the success of the YouCut campaign. YouCut, conceived earlier this year as an interactive way to expose and eliminate runaway spending in Congress, has focused so far on smaller projects (albeit still expensive). As all politicians know — but some refuse to admit — it’s the big issues that need to be solved. It’s refreshing that Cantor is explaining the scale of the problem.

The third video making waves was produced by my colleague Brandon Stewart at The Heritage Foundation. It uses the concept of a theatrical trailer to tell the story of the impending tax hikes. It’s a clever way to communicate the seriousness of the issue in a non-wonky way.

“Obama’s Tax Hike: The Movie” has more than 25,000 views. More importantly, it has generated a robust debate about taxes on YouTube — in which Heritage is engaging. After all, isn’t that the point? A video could be hilarious and popular, but if it doesn’t advance the agenda, it’s a lost opportunity.

These three videos are just a few examples of the good work being done. They’re not the first and won’t be the last, but their success is an indication that Americans are seeking serious policy information in new ways.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner.

But let’s think outside of the box here. Why limit this to news organizations? Could you image what a forward thinking non-profit or advocacy group could do with this kind of technology?

Members could upload their personal stories and testimonials in a YouTube story-bank. Constituents could post video messages to Congress. Donors could share why they are supporting a cause or explain to their friends why they are participating in a fundraising challenge. Perhaps in some cases citizen journalists could be recruited to gather video ‘research’ on an opposing group or in support of selected issue priorities. (If you have other ideas about how non-profit/advocacy groups can use this tool please add them as a comment to this post or tweet via @zablud).

To see examples of how advocacy organizations are already utilizing video content from supporters please visit two sites Adfero developed SpeakNowForKids or MyCommunityMyBank. While these sites were custom created before the YouTube DIRECT tool was available, both these and future sites could certainly be developed or enhanced using this new tool.

According to YouTube, the “key features of YouTube DIRECT include:

AARP’s new campaign is really about connecting with voters.  The very essence of this video campaign is to give the people a chance to insert themselves into the message, and then insert their friends.  Very personal touch, indeed.

While not the first to do something like this (Job Jab lets you put your face on an animated character), this light-hearted campaign really gets to the heart of electoral politics–YOU.

Want to send the ad to your friends with their name in it? Click here and have some fun.

By embarking on the project — and possibly continuing it with congressional video — I hoped to provide an important service to our readers who want more than sound bites from the candidates. VoterWatch allows you to do just that by blogging within video coverage.

The experience was rather enjoyable. After watching last night’s “Saturday Night Live” skit with Fred Armisen and Darrell Hammond, I even had a few laughs at the real Barack Obama and John McCain.

What amazed me is the power of interactivity actually realized by video coverage of the Democratic and Republic National Conventions last month.  I’ll simply refer for the immediate moment to coverage of KCRW radio in Santa Monica, reported on by Anne Eisenberg last week in the New York Times.  Eisenberg’s story in the Times ogled at 124,000 views of 67 convention clips shot by KCRW staffers the Democratic Convention last month in Denver.

KCRW Reporters used cell phones – Nokia N95 phones on the AT&T 3G network – and uploaded to the KCRW web using Kyte’s streaming service.

We overlook, to some detriment, the power of intimacy in advocacy.  But video – particularly personalized and individualized video – has that power to recover the sense of intimacy lost in a big media, packaged view of politics and advocacy.  It makes me think back to those days when music was “piped” into rooms, almost like the oxygen that’s pumped into casinos.

Just look at “there” you are with the video streaming, as Andy Jordan showed us in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Tech Diary.

Intimacy was always the highway of personalized relationships.  Quite literally, intimacy gives you access.  There’s something happening here, in the wild wild west of a new technology through services like Kyte.  Oh yes, someone or some ones will seize control and “incorporate” the technology much like television and radio were “captured” by the professional class long ago.  But the ability to get into someone’s telephone and actually see them and speak with them is eerily like that coach’s voice speaking in the quarterback’s ear.  It’s old-school.